Open to All poets
All poems must be submitted via Submittable to be considered.
We are seeking poems that explore the creative alchemy of words, form and visuals.
- Poems can be text, audio, or video files, exploring entirely new forms, experimental existing forms, or radical subversions of tradition. Only electronic submissions via Submittable will be accepted.
- Do not put any indentifying information on your submission. Submittable will collect that information separate from the actual entry. Failure to leave indentifying information off of the poems will result in elimination from the contest.
- Submit your experimental poems from June 15 to July 31
- Reading fee: $15 for up to 3 unpublished poems
- $1000 prize and recognition in the Connecticut River Review await the winner! Up to four finalists will also be recognized.
- We do not accept work that was in any way created with AI software.
Judge 2026 Katherine E. Schneider
Katherine E. Schneider is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Northeast Coast literary journal and press, and she is honored to be the 2025-2027 Poet Laureate of Norwalk, Connecticut. She holds an MFA from Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and is a co-founder and co-host of FUMFA Poets & Writers Live. In her various roles, she has organized and hosted countless online and in-person events for poets, writers, and the greater creative community. Her first poetry collection, I Used to Remember the Story of How, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Her publication credits for individual poems include Ruminate, Blue Line, The Poetry Porch, The Paddock Review, Collateral, the 2023 and 2024Connecticut Literary Anthology, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, and more. She also contributed the essay on Kassia to The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project. Breaking the Fever is her second book of poetry, and it is the first publication of The Northeast Coast Press.
Winner of the 2025 Connecticut Poetry Society’s Experimental Poetry Contest
Ivy Raff, (Brooklyn, NY)
Judy
Judge’s comments:
About Judy
When I first read the submissions for this year’s experimental poetry contest, “Judy” stood out immediately and needled my heart. I admire this poem not only for its formal engagement with the haibun and with Japanese death poems, but also for the way it weaves and fractures narratives: an eponymous aunt once idealized, a daughter’s death by suicide, body dysmorphia, sibling support, childlessness, Judaism—all set against the textured backdrop of New York City, from Winthrop Street to Brighton Beach to East Harlem.
The fact that “Judy” was paired in the author’s packet with “Pantoums Are Poems of Repetitive Lines,” another powerful poem that denounces and mourns the genocide in Gaza from a Jewish perspective, adds even more complexity. Together, the two poems expand and complicate one another, deepening the sense of loss, witness, and reckoning with death that animates “Judy.”
– Judge Claire Donato
Finalists:
Jonathan Memmert, (Middletown, CT) “7 / bro / ken / som / e th / in / gs”
Caroline White, (Greensboro, NC) “Inventing zero”
About 7 / bro / ken / som / e th / in / gs and Inventing zero
I continued to return to “7 / bro / ken / som / e th / in / gs” and “Inventing Zero,” the two poems I selected as finalists.
The form of “7 / bro / ken / som / e th / in / gs” is staged in two broken columns, where fragmentation becomes both structure and feeling. It is a peculiar, visually compelling love poem.
In “Inventing Zero,” the speaker practices inserting IV needles into an orange before using them on a sick, elderly cat, who conjures generational memory. I continue to think about the speaker eating the orange. Both of these poems showcase elegant prosody, winding and intricate syntax, and a keen attention to sensory and temporal detail.
– Judge Claire Donato
Judge 2025 Claire Donato
Claire Donato is the author of several books, most recently Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions) and Woebegone (Theaphora). Other recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Parapraxis, Soft Union, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, and Forever, and she has contributed essays to anthologies including The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer and The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman. She lives in Brooklyn, serves as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, and is a candidate in psychoanalysis at the Contemporary Freudian Society.
Past Judges
Claire Donato: 2024 Judge
Claire Donato is the author of Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), a not-novel novel; The Second Body (Poor Claudia, 2016; Tarpaulin Sky Press, reissue forthcoming 2020), a collection of poems; and To Hell, with Boundaries (Tarpaulin Sky, forthcoming), a cross-genre collection. Recent performances have been at the following venues: The Poetry Project, New York; Lévy Gorvy, New York; Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles; The Empty Bottle, Chicago; SPACE Gallery, Portland, Maine; and Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts; awards and honors include Hemera Contemplative Fellowship, Rutgers University Digital Studies Center Fellowship, and a Millay Colony for the Arts Fellowship. In addition to teaching, Claire serves as a mentor for the PEN Prison Writing Project and practices Zen meditation. She teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs at Pratt Institute, and currently lives with one cat and some 50 houseplants in a psychic medium’s building in Brooklyn.
Richard Deming: 2023 Judge
Senior Lecturer in English, Director of Creative Writing
Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems, Day for Night, appeared in 2016. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford UP, 2008), and Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy (Cornell UP, 2018). He contributes to such magazines as Artforum, Sight & Sound, and The Boston Review. His poems have appeared in such places as Iowa Review, Field, American Letters & Commentary, and The Nation. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing. Winner of the Berlin Prize, he was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.